


Lies Found Favor In Heaven

by monochrome_agalma



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Also I can't stop thinking about how the Third House manages prion disease so heads up for that, CW: (hypothetical) pregnancy, CW: tonal whiplash, Canon-typical trans-coded Harryanthe, F/F, Gen, Humor, Lying to God for fun and profit, No actual sex happens in this Ianthe is just foul, Post-HtN, i guess?????
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:46:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28695669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monochrome_agalma/pseuds/monochrome_agalma
Summary: God looked at you and saw everything wrong with the world he had wrought. It was painfully clear. So, when he asked about you and Harrow, you told him a lot of hot bullshit.Or: what if John tried to talk safe sex with Ianthe too?
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 14
Kudos: 69





	Lies Found Favor In Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a TPT server riff and my burning desire to see John and Ianthe attempt to bond in _Alecto,_ then fail miserably again and again. Also my fascination with the subtext in John's conversation with Harrow that what he's really worried about is somebody getting someone else pregnant.
> 
> Title is kind of a lyric from "Favorite" by Neko Case, which (unfortunately) is actually more of an Augustine banger. 
> 
> Thanks to the wonderful gallpall for beta’ing! This one goes out to all the parents of partners and friends I've made really uncomfortable with my sheer gay presence.

You had long since realized that God did not care for you. If you were someone like Harrowhark Nonagesimus, this might have disturbed you down to your pious core. You are instead someone quite like Ianthe Tridentarius, and you are used to antipathy from imperial dignitaries, religious officials, and father figures -- would-be or actual -- alike. John Gaius, you are coming to realize, is barely a functioning sum of these three parts. Why would you expect him to like you?

Then again, one would hope pulling the Emperor Undying from Hell’s slavering jaws might land one on his good side, even a little.

Of course he had thanked you profusely once you’d yanked each other onto the banks of the River, spluttering and shivering and shaking wet ghosts from your hair. He and his Empire, the Houses First down through Ninth -- in short his entire known universe -- owed you a debt that could never truly be repaid. The King of Nine Renewals himself salvation-bound to you, Most Faithful of his Saints, His Own Right Hand, His Ultimate Gesture, True Mouth of the Emperor, the Snazzy Crown Jewel in His Baby-Finger Chaplet, one similarly bullshit epithet after another. Perhaps the River’s maddening influence had made his divine tongue a little gibbery; the parade of gratitudes was long. It was also perfunctory.

“Ianthe, if there’s any way I can even begin to thank you for this, do just let me know. I’ll try my best to make it happen.”

You didn’t let him get to “I’m only God, after all.” You were incandescent with adrenaline and self-importance and there was River water on your tongue too. You answered immediately. 

“Pay for me and Harrow’s wedding.”

The Emperor All-Giving did not speak for a good while after that. He did not speak to you while you traversed the shores of the River, save for the stray “don’t step on that eyeball.” When you collapsed on the banks, your energy more devoted to maintaining perpetual ghost wards than making your legs work, God did not even ask if you were alright. This might have hurt your feelings, but your insides were trying to shudder out of your skin and, again, you had never cared all that much about being Daddy’s favorite. 

You faded in and out before waking properly in a small cot on a shuttle, a few hours into the journey to Trentham. The Emperor sat next to your bed, too aloof to be said to be "at your bedside." He looked as if he had about seven dozen things to say to you and wanted to say none of them.

So he looked away and picked probably the worst thing he could have: “Were you two… were you at least being safe?”

You were still a little unsteady, but you perked up at the assumption. Did God really think you had charmed your way into Harrow Nonagesimus’ bone-encrusted pants? You felt the familiar crinkling of dried gore on your face as you sat up and asked, “Pardon me, Lord?”

The King Undying looked at you then. It was a familiar look; he had often looked at you this way, since your very first audience, after Canaan House. He looked at you like you were the consummate success of his system, just the sort of necromancer his houses were designed to churn out: brilliant and tireless and hungry, lacking in both scruple and remorse. Ready to kill and devour, if only he should ask -- and unlike Harrowhark or Mercymorn or Augustine or Cytherea or Gideon the First, you didn’t even have the decency to feel bad about it. You were his indictment.

“Were you being safe with Harrowhark?”

Like you were pawing at her with stained hands. Like if you touched her in the wrong way, you could shatter her completely. God looked at you and saw everything wrong with the world he had wrought. It was painfully clear. 

So you told him a lot of hot bullshit.

“Oh not even close,” you answered, “we’d just been raw doggin’ it day in and day out.”

He spluttered. _“Excuse me?”_

“Ah, sorry, Lord -- having lots and lots of unprotected sex.”

“Unprotected sex.” It was more fractured echo than cross-examination. You thought this a rather Godlike quality, to ask a very open question and luxuriate in shock when the answer was anything but precisely what one expected. 

“Yes, unprotected. No prophylactics, no barriers. We didn’t even put down a towel for the blood. Good thing the Mithraeum is mouldering at the bottom of the River; you should have seen the mess Harrow made of my carpets.” You tacked on, very innocently: “Can lyctors contract illnesses, Teacher?

“Cytherea was very ill, as you know.” 

The transparency with which he was trying to change the subject! You’d have thought the Necrolord Prime might possess a little more guile.

“Of course, Lord,” you answered, “but she was Seventh, sick from birth. If anything, becoming a lyctor kept her in stasis. She couldn’t cough up a thimbleful of thalergy without her cavalier’s soul shedding more. I mean new illnesses, ones we didn’t ascend with, ones we might have picked up rather carelessly somewhere else.”

God did not enlighten you on this point. He worried at his lip a little and looked quite awkward again. You made like your cavalier and twisted the knife.

“Poor Harry, wherever she is now. She’s probably riddled with venereal diseases -- you know, the strains you can only get on the Third. Like mad cow but for your crotch.”

This was ridiculous. This wouldn’t have made a lick of sense to anyone who knew anything -- cerebral matter was permanently off the animaphiliac’s menu for good reason -- but it was becoming clear to you that God was the sort to habitually distance himself from the suffering of his houses, their prion diseases and the petty agonies of their genitalia. He probably couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” said God.

“What’s harder to believe is how much Harrow enjoyed it. Sure, I’m debauched, and it’s true what they say about Shadow Vestals and celibacy, at least in Harrow’s case. But I worked her around and now she’s a regular sex freak. Maybe even worse than me.”

God began flapping his hands at you, a pathetic swatting motion that seemed to say, "I shouldn’t have to be hearing this from my twenty-two year old bodyguard about my possibly-dead eighteen year old bodyguard, the one I really wish had been my celestial spawn, the one who put a sword through my former employee and a soup-borne skeleton through my personal hitman but whom I still seem to be convinced is simply too good for this world, too pure, like some kind of cute, unassuming pastry." 

You just couldn’t bring yourself to stop. “We tried it all, didn’t we? Positions, venues, orifices, organs. My viscera still ache thinking about her mean streak. She’d make these wicked little bone manacles and clamp me up like a thief in the stocks, then we’d rearrange each other’s guts.”

“I should hope that’s a young person’s euphemism,” he muttered, half to himself. He looked as if he might need a sick bag.

“It _is_ a young person’s euphemism, Lord.”

For a moment, he was a little less green around the gills.

“But I also mean it literally,” you added. “Here’s a sexy sex tip for you, Teacher: all metaphors are real and can be _very_ sexy. We only went literal when Harry was feeling particularly romantic. I don’t mean to brag, but my small intestine drives that girl absolutely wild. She’d put a ring on the bile duct, if she could.”

“Ianthe.”

“One time she pulled out half of my teeth and set them back in place with her tongue.”

“ _Ianthe._ ”

“One time I chewed a big hole in her stomach and just went to town on it. Harrow licked every last bit of herself off of me, my face, my fingers, off of my --”

“By the ghosts in the river, Ianthe, aren’t you at all ashamed to talk about your sister lyctor that way?”

You tried to reply with something witty and cool -- _am I my sister lyctor’s keeper?_ \-- but the proximity of ‘sister’ and ‘shame’ in the Emperor’s plea launched you into hysterics. While you laughed your sororally shameless head off, he moved on to platitudes.

“At least Harrowhark is in one piece now. Really, I hate to sound like someone’s humorless father --” (surprising given that this was how he always sounded when discussing Harrow with you) “-- but I’m shocked at your carelessness. I guess it’s to be expected from a young woman of your age, but you could have caused some serious damage, what with Harrowhark’s --” (you watched him fish around for just the right condescension) “-- special situation. Not to mention the other risks.”

He probably meant emotional risks, the warping of poor little Harrow’s vulnerable psyche. He couldn’t know that she had already perpetrated more devastating psychological violence against herself than you ever could, even if it was your hand that held the scalpel. He couldn’t know that you had tried to talk her out of it, tried to get her to keep herself whole -- “fractured,” she’d called you both, for doing what God had asked of you. He would never know how you’d fallen to your knees before her, clasped her chin like the lowliest suppliant and begged her not to throw her life away just because God couldn’t be assed to look after her. Twist the knife. Engage the mechanism. Watch those hidden blades maim. 

You too could feign parental shock.

“Our Harry? Necromancing for two? I suppose with God nothing will be impossible. I never really considered it, I didn’t even think she _could_ \-- you must know fertility isn’t quite the Ninth’s strong suit these days. Would I have been able to tell, Lord? If she were?”

You gave him no chance to fail to answer: “All the more reason to set a wedding date! You’re still picking up the check for that one, by the way, right? A debt that can never be repaid and all that. No need to grab the shotgun from its shelf, my Kindly Prince, we’ll have no children born out of wedlock under your watch. Well, no _more_ children born out of wedlock --”

The gaze of the Emperor rounded on you. You thought he might strike you, but he just fixed you in his haunted supernova stare. There were the eyes that had watched Mercymorn the First unspooled like a fistful of wet, scarlet yarn. There was the wrath of which Third House bishops trembled to speak. There was the Necrolord Prime, the man who became God and the God who became man, the undying body to which you, as fist, were mere appendage -- and you had just thrown his illegitimate daughter in his face. And implied that you’d knocked up his missing, would-be daughter. And quoted him back at himself, which was honestly a little bratty of you. 

Before God could decide to give up on this lyctor thing entirely and boot you out of the airlock for your crimes, there was that Sarpedon again, from the _Erebos_. He was standing in the doorway like someone who’d just opened a very moldy fridge.

“The Emperor’s presence is solicited on the flight deck,” he ventured, and paused before adding: “the Eighth Saint’s as well, if she is able.”

God rose from the chair next to your bed -- even less "by your bedside" than he had been when you woke -- and said, “She is not. She’s still got some River in her. Poor thing’s all… _discombobulated._ "

As they exited the cabin and down the hall, you fancied that Sarpedon was wondering exactly how it benefitted the Lord to speak of his lyctor as one would a puppy who’d broken into the pantry and made herself sick. You hoped this was the first of many precious moments in which you might marginally diminish God in the eyes of his faithful. You made a mental note to be more careful next time, when you no longer had the River as an excuse. 

Then again, there was that debt, and you were his _ultimate_ gesture, in the final sense. 

God did not care for you, but he needed you -- at least a little -- and he might pay for your wedding yet.


End file.
